you have avoided paying federal income taxes? no, but i pay tax and i pay federal tax, too. but i have a write-off. a lot of it s depreciation, which is a wonderful charge. i love depreciation. you know, she s giving it to us. reporter: it is literally a gift from congress. the irs rules that allow businesses to write off depreciation on just about everything, even if it s a building, and even if the value of the building is increasing. here s how. think of a huge group of companies. that s what trump has. and what he listed on his financial disclosures. some may make big profits. some may have big losses. and some, like his real estate holdings, can have both at the very same time. take, for example, 40 wall street, one of trump s biggest properties. it could be making a huge amount of money on rent, but he could end up not owing income tax on it because of tax breaks like depreciation. example, you can write off wear and tear on cabinets, elevators, even the building itself, even
but there s some other aspect of this. and nbc would say, we re not going to comment on what it is. i said, there s some mysterious issue here, and they said, yes. we should point out, there was a report, i can t remember where it was online, saying that burnett had threatened people with lawsuits buzzfeed reported this. he denies it. he s denied it categorically. in fact, he said he s not even a trump supporter. but a friend of trump, for sure. i think this is a reminder that trump was in some ways supported by nbc through the apprentice, right? he rose up for years through the apprentice. this has been an nbc story through and through. it was an nbc access hollywood tape that ultimately did really severe damage by his campaign, yet it ended up being leaked through the washington post. but throughout all of this, donald trump is the entertainer is what we see. and if donald trump says, if there s more tapes released of me, i m going to keep talking about bill clint
it is true. we don t know whether he ll show up. we don t know whether he ll have a team of advisers. i will say, as i was saying last night online, i thought that actually the format last night, i thought the moderators did a good job of including the audience and being able, also, to persistently follow lines of argument. i thought they set a good example. what trump will do in the next couple of days, we don t know, but i think we ve seen that hillary clinton through her debating career has never really been wrong-footed. in the face of a lot of different stuff coming at her, include having the four women in the audience, she managed to keep more or less on keel. james, bret, gloria, thank you all. fascinating discussion. just ahead, the possibility that more trump hot mike moments exist. and more insight into how the tape we do have got on the radar. and we ll focus more on the tone of last night s debate and how it differs from anything anyone as ever seen in moderate debate
people. if it becomes intentionally personal, that s not helpful to trump and it s definitely not helpful to the american people. although, gloria, if you re a trump supporter, a lot of people believe last night, you know, who support donald trump, that he stopped the bleeding, essentially, with his debate performance last night. well, what he did was sort of give a primary debate performance, to a great degree. so he was preaching to the choir, when he was getting personal about hillary clinton, i mean, lock her up has been the big cry at the republican convention and he did his own version of that last night, you know, i d put you in jail. the problem that i think some republicans had is that he can t win with his base. he s got to broaden this out. and the way he can do that is to talk about the issues that some conservatives wanted to talk about, which is, say, obamacare, or trade, or status quo versus change. hillary clinton is untrustworthy on the e-mails.
can you say how many years you have avoided paying federal income taxes? no, but i pay tax and i pay federal tax, too. but i have a write-off. a lot of it s depreciation, which is a wonderful charge. i love depreciation. you know, she s giving it to us. reporter: it is literally a gift from congress. the irs rules that allow businesses to write off depreciation on just about everything, even if it s a building, and even if the value of the building is increasing. here s how. think of a huge group of companies. that s what trump has. and what he listed on his financial disclosures. some may make big profits. some may have big losses. and some, like his real estate holdings, can have both at the very same time. take, for example, 40 wall street, one of trump s biggest properties. it could be making a huge amount of money on rent, but he could end up not owing income tax on it because of tax breaks like depreciation. example, you can write off wear and tear on cabinets, elevators, e